Nokia Siemens expands Oragadam facility

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has expanded its manufacturing delivery centre located at Oragadam in Chennai to 55,000 sqm from 35,000 sqm in addition to ramping up the product lines to address the demand from the telecom sector.

"The expansion will strengthen India's position as one of our major manufacturing hubs in the Asia Pacific in addition to supporting the growth of India's growing telecom sector", said Ashish Chowdhary, head of India and customer operations East, NSN.

The company had made a cumulative investment of about $70 million including the $15 million that went for the recent expansion.

The Chennai facility, second global for the company, has played a key role in enabling Indian operators to roll out their 3G networks quickly and make NSN one of the leading international 3G mobile infrastructure and services vendor in India with around 30 per cent market share, he added.

Herbert Merz, head of operations and member of the NSN executive board, said the company was active in sourcing of components from local vendors.

"Last year, we have procured close to $300 million worth of equipments from the Indian suppliers. We buy items like digital signal processing, semiconductors, mechatronics from the domestic suppliers," he said.

Supply equipments not available in India like high value semiconductor, printed circuit boards, passive resistors and capacitors, etc are bought from international suppliers. "This $300 million sourcing is only for our Chennai factory and our component sourcing is many times higher in the overall Indian operations," he said.

The global telecom B2B vendor is currently catering to 10 Indian telecom operators including Aircel, Bharti Airtel, BSNL, defence sector, Idea, Railways, Tata, Vodafone, Videocon, among others. The company has about 15 per cent of its global workforce in Chennai and with the expansion it would be rolling out five new telecom products along with the existing 28 products.